Yichun

it was my first experience doing flag day for cip yesterday. i realised that flag day is the most enjoyable cip activity ever and it lets you earn the most hours with upmost ease if you get the hang of the strategies to adopt.

was forced to do flag day in the afternoon while most of my friends and classmates did in the morning because they were not band members. anyway, collected my tin at around 1.00 pm with some other bandsmen and went to have lunch first. after that we separated to get donations from the public.

at first i kind of hate doing it. people just walked passed and some were terrible. i feel like a terrorist because some people are purposely walking away from me, which i really wonder why, because i would not force them to donate if they don't want anyway. one mother in particular asked her daughters to "zhou kai yi dian, zhou kai yi dian!" which i distinctly heard her saying when she saw that i was trying to approach her for donations.

in the end i had more experience in it and starting planning and implementing my strategies.

i was too lazy to take the train to other places to collect funds. so i stayed at jurong east mrt station for the whole afternoon without going anywhere else. at that period of time there were tons of students doing flag day there for the SAME organisation. so i decided to adopt the "smile-and-ask" strategy.

i approached every single aunty walking past me at the open aread outside popular. however, you must be careful of those people that you apporoach. if that aunty is one who is walking very fast, FORGET it. there is 99.99999999% chances that she will never donate a single cent. or if that aunty has a "i-am-feeling-pissed" look on her face, i don't even try to apporoach here because she will most probably walked past me as if i was transparent or shove me away. and realised that i did not mention "uncles". yeay this is because not because i was sexist, but because i have the guard feeling that female will have a higher possibility of donating then males. and i was correct because more than half of the people who donated were female. but surprisingly many YOUNG COUPLES donated too. at first they walked past me, but after that they took out their wallets to take out some coins and walked back to me to donate them.

standing at the bottom of a escalator will be the perfect place to get more donations. i stood at the bottom of the escalator leading from the mrt platform and got half the can filled in about an hour. you must hold the can and stand there and stare at those people that are coming down from the escalator when they were still near the top of the escalator. then they will automatically take out their wallets to get some coins to donate. it is really magical, don't know why staring and smiling at people at the top of the escalator will actually cause them to turn so generous to donate. and as i was standing at the bottom of the escalator, it will give them taking-out-wallet-to-get-money allowance time while they were coming down from the escalator and almost conveniently slot in the coin and get their sticker.

standing outside a crowded shop helps too because there is a high possibility that customers get coins as change and will also conveniently donate them to you. yar of course with the help of the staring and smiling startegy, which is a really magical thing.

so with these strategies i managed to get about 3/4 of the tin filled after two hours. for the remaining time i went to the ice-skating ring at JEC with zhong xiao as we both wanted more cip hours =P. and we were lucky there was coincidentally a hockey match going on at the ring and we could entertain ourselves for the remaining hour =).

fast-and-easy ways to get donations during flag day in a nutshell:
1)approach every single "not walking too fast" and "i-am-in-a-good-mood faced" aunty
2)stand at the bottom of a escalator
3)staring and smiling at people
4)standing outside a crowded shop such as popular and NTUC

actually wanted to join the second flag day to get even more cip hours =P and to test these strategies again but there was band camp on that day.

so well everyone do test and try out whether these strategies really work! =)

then you can slack for the remaining hours and also obtain a decently filled can =)! YEAY!